Contrarian Quotes & Sayings

One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either. — Christopher Hitchens

The overwhelming majority of people are comfortable with consensus, but successful investors tend to have a contrarian bent, — Seth Klarman

The wide multitude wanted to seem contrarian. It meant that this type of nonconformism had to be mass-produced. — Andy Warhol

The only way to consistently stay ahead of the game is to adopt a long-term view and, if appropriate, with a strong contrarian spin. — Mark Mobius

I'm a bit of a contrarian, so I like the idea of going on stage without makeup, without the hair being done, in the jeans and shirt I've been wearing all day. At first that was an issue, because I didn't want to be disrespectful. — Lou Doillon

As an investor-entrepreneur, I've always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking. — Peter Thiel

I've always been a contrarian of sorts. I'm not exactly sure where this quality comes from. I am among the approximately 13 percent of people who are left-handed, and a great deal has been written about the differences in the ways southpaws process ideas and motivations. In any event, always fitting in or going with the crowd has never been a big concern for me if my head and heart lay elsewhere. Admittedly, my inclination to stray from the pack didn't go over too well with my drill sergeant. My armed forces stint offered many lessons, one of which was that if I was to be successful as an individual in whatever I chose to do, I would have to work, and think, independently. — Charles Brandes

The spirit of my films ... I always want them to be kind of contrarian. Meticulous on the one hand, but unbelievably sloppy and careless on the other. I guess that's what you get anyway, if you're not planning very much. — Guy Maddin

When you're young, you want to make every kind of film: musicals, Westerns, horror. Slowly you begin to hear your own voice. I hope people receive what I do as small, personal films that are somewhat contrarian about their main characters. — Jason Reitman

A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don't want. — Rebecca Solnit

I've actually always wanted to write like a one-person show that was sort of a romantic comedy - a show that was kind of cynical about romance and marriage but ultimately embraced it. Because I feel like comedy is always cynical, inherently, because it's contrarian. — Mike Birbiglia

It's actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It's hard to be contrarian and right. — Reid Hoffman

I have followed my heart my whole life - the crazy kid, a contrarian by nature, and I've been in trouble in points in my career. — Sarah Carter

In public market investing, as in many things, you achieve big success when you're both contrarian and right. — Reid Hoffman

The late Christopher Hitchens had the professional contrarian's fixation on attacking sacred cows, and rather soon after his cancer diagnosis, he became one himself. — Alex Pareene

Pseudoscience is almost always recognizable from a distance, and easy to confirm on close examination. Science is, however, not immune from hubris, and bad science can be tougher to spot. Those of us who make a living from science or science media must display scientific integrity. We must constantly test our assumptions and fight the siren song of consensus when our data tells us to be contrarian. We must remain independent of political or religious bias in evaluating our work. We must admit when we are wrong, and remain willing to evolve when verifiable data demands change. We must admit when we are uncertain, remain humble in advances, and offer courageous and independent advice grounded in science. — K. Lee Lerner

I don't think of myself as a trendy person at all, and if I'm anything, I'm probably contrarian. — Alfred Enoch

Successful contrarian investing requires us to live with discomfort, for being "wrong" and alone. But bargains do not exist in the absence of fear. — Robert D. Arnott

Contrarian thinking at its best simply asks, Is this really true? It speaks up when the politically correct answer or the conventional wisdom doesn't match reality - when things simply don't work the way everyone says they should. — Larry Osborne

I guess I much prefer the path of the contrarian: the guy who goes against the grain a bit. The careers of the people who I admire deeply - like the Coen brothers and Soderbergh - don't repeat themselves, and they make radically different films at times, and I think that's wonderful. — Joe Carnahan

He was a conservative all right, but invariably he gave the impression that he was a conservative because he was surrounded by liberals; that he had been a revolutionist if that had been required in order to be socially disruptive. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Value investing by its very nature is contrarian. — Seth Klarman

The best opportunities are often ones where you're being contrarian. That doesn't mean being contrarian for contrarian's sake, but it means you're thoughtful about the risks of following the crowd. — David Sze

"Cynicism," like "heresy" and "heterodoxy" and "atheism" and "agnosticism" and "paganism" and "heathenism," is above all else a way for organized orthodoxy's caste of official censors to encyst and segregate and thus neutralize all contrarian forms of seeing and thinking, all (necessarily implicitly) prohibited and repressed ways of exercising disruptive and iconoclastic intuition and intellection (for to analyze and explain these things too openly is to give them publicity and potential cogency when the point is to asphyxiate them). — Kenny Smith

I'm part of the fashion system, but I don't want to follow all the rules. I don't want to be contrarian - I just want to do my own things, which are most honest and correct to do. — Dries Van Noten

When your views are truly contrarian, they are inevitably uncomfortable. Courage and the ability to withstand pain are required, — Michael Steinhardt

A contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is thinking rather than polling. — Warren Buffett

The most important lesson to learn about devil's advocacy isn't the need for a formal contrarian position; it's the need to interpret criticism as a noble function. An effective promotor fidei is not a token argumentative smarty-pants; it's someone who deeply respects the Catholic Church and is trying to defend the faith by surfacing contrary arguments in situations where skepticism is unlikely to surface naturally. — Chip Heath

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian. — Will Self

Ben was really a contrarian but he didn't use those terms because he was really buying value. — Walter Schloss

The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself. — Peter Thiel

When I was young, I had this contrarian thing, and my music for a long time was an extension of that. I didn't want to entertain people; I had too much vanity to be an entertainer. I think that some layers of vanity came off. — J. Tillman

World-changing startups need to be premised on accurate contrarian theories. — Reid Hoffman

To succeed as a contrarian you must recognize what the crowd believes, have concrete justification for why the majority is wrong, and have the patience and conviction to stick with what is, by definition, an unpopular bet. — Whitney Tilson

(John) Adams acknowledged that he had made himself obnoxious to many of his colleagues, who regarded him as a one-man bonfire of the vanities. This never troubled Adams, who in his more contrarian moods claimed that his unpopularity provided clinching evidence that his position was principled, because it was obvious that he was not courting popular opinion. His alienation, therefore, was a measure of his integrity. — Joseph J. Ellis

I've never walked the same path other people found comfortable and I'm not going to start now. — Lora Leigh

I am something of a contrarian, I suppose. I feel less comfortable when everybody agrees with me. I say, 'I better reexamine my position!' I probably believe that the worst opinions in my court have been unanimous. Because there's nobody on the other side pointing out all the flaws. — Antonin Scalia

To a contrarian like me, constant advice not to do something almost always starts me quickly down the risky, unpopular path. — Michael Bloomberg

Decision making brings together many of the finest traits of contrarian leadership
thinking gray, thinking free, artful listening, delegating authority while retaining ultimate responsibility,artful procrastination, ignoring sunk costs, taking luck into account, and listening to one's inner voice. Weaving these traits together is an art itself. When it is done well, the result is a thing of beauty and a powerful tool for effective leadership. — Steven B. Sample

I got told by pretty much everyone I knew that, if I'm going to be out in L.A., working, you need a car. So I was thinking, I'm going to try and not get a car, just because I'm a contrarian that way. — Alfred Enoch

I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth. — Peter Thiel

I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back. — Steven Pinker

The very act of becoming an entrepreneur is contrarian to middle class values, study hard, get a good job, be happy with secure income and steady salary. — Rashmi Bansal

My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. — Peter Thiel

In order to win as a contrarian, you need perfect timing and the perfect size. — Henrique M. Simoes

Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All is to be doubted]. — Christopher Hitchens

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth. — Peter Thiel

So successful has the ideological-political-cultural purge been executed that it is hard indeed to find vigorous liberals, and no energetic, coherent and cogent leftists at all can find expression in our controlled media and educational systems. Forget about wholesale culture- or civilization-critics like Marxists. Universities have to be purged of any "radicalism" that can see through to the roots of issues and pathologies, for the same reasons that workers have to have nascent unions aborted among them and contrarian newspapers and media have to be starved of advertising. — Kenny Smith

If you make a film and then two and a half, three years later, suddenly the country's changed and you look like you just happened to hit it. I actually like being contrarian. I would have preferred to come out three years ago when everyone was disagreeing with me. But hopefully it asks a lot of questions about our responsibility in sending young men and women to war, especially a war that's so complex, where there's no right answer, where they're forced with impossible decisions every day. — Paul Haggis

By nominating Chuck Hagel to be his Defense secretary, President Obama is putting forward an aloof contrarian who doesn't suffer fools - a striving politician who considers himself above politics. — Ron Fournier

Contrarian thinking doesn't make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up. — Peter Thiel

I'll work with anyone - and I really do mean that - Democrat, Republican, independent, Libertarian, contrarian, vegetarian. — Elizabeth Warren

Don't be afraid of developing a contrarian viewpoint on what type of person is perfect for your company as CTO and how you're going to find that person. — Mariam Naficy

Not a 'Mad Men' guy. Never got into it. I'm kind of a contrarian that way. If something gets too popular too fast before I can get on it, I just get really annoyed. Everybody tells me I'm an idiot; it's supposed to be amazing. I saw some of the second season; I loved it, but I was just detached. I didn't get into it. — D.J. Cotrona

It's an interesting dynamic living in New York in general as a Boston fan. It's kind of fun that way. It's fun to be the contrarian when everyone hates you as long as your team is winning. — Katie Nolan

The main reason that we felt positive was because all of the trends were so negative. This was not just to be stubbornly or rigidly contrarian - because being a true contrarian means not to go slavishly against the grain, but to be always independent in your thinking. It was simply that we and the short-term smart money were operating according to different time frames. — Mark Mobius

Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be. I don't want anyone I know to take that terrible chance. And the only way to avoid it is to listen to that small voice inside you that tells you to make mischief, to have fun, to be contrarian, to go another way. George Eliot wrote, 'It is never too late to be what you might have been.' It is never too early, either. — Anna Quindlen

When everyone is a contrarian, nobody is a contrarian — Mark Skousen

Ultimately the most profound problems with psychotherapy have always been that instead of possessing any contrarian or transcendent values to enable it to produce insights countervailing against our dysfunctional and incoherent and humanly destructive culture, its "therapists" have been virtually all shills or agents for this culture, trying to accommodate their patients to a fundamentally unhealthy and insane way of life. — Kenny Smith

No matter what I tend to be doing, generally people always think I'm crazy, first of all, because I'm always talking about things in the future that haven't happened yet, and people have a hard time believing what's gonna happen. Secondly, I'm almost always a contrarian, whatever direction everybody else is going in, I'm probably figuring out a way to go in a completely opposite direction. — Trip Hawkins

I don't really know much about pirates, or pirate culture. I'd be a contrarian pirate. — Todd Barry

I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel. — Jenny Offill

I swim against the tide because I like to annoy. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Go with your gut instincts even if it is contrarian to what the "experts" suggest. — Jim Rohn

The urge to be contrarian was strong. If she set herself apart, perhaps she would be less of the person she feared she had become. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It's very conventional to say that you're a contrarian these days. — Reid Hoffman

I mean, I'm not a contrarian. — Lorenzo Di Bonaventura

I am a contrarian. — Barry Diller

Value investing is at its core the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator. — Seth Klarman